A punk rocker I used to know

Well, it's not cinema, but it could have been if they had played their cards right.

In the 1980s, I worked in an drug and alcoholism treatment center. Many of the employees were recovering drug addicts and alcoholics. And one of them was a fellow I had known in junior high school. I'll call him X.

I remember X before he knew anything about drugs. We were in the 7th grade and an older kid in art class drew a picture of a bong, of a bong in use. I assumed it was something like a burrito. The drawing wasn't clear. I wasn't going to admit I didn't know. But X showed greater intellectual curiosity and demanded an explanation. "What's a bong? What is it? Do you know what it is? What's a bong?"

A couple of years later, we were still in junior high. X had drawn a diagram. He had a built-in desk in his bedroom. He took out the drawers, put in false drawer fronts, and placed a marijuana plant and some plant lights in the empty space. All carefully arranged so his mother wouldn't find it.

In the '80s, X had gone through treatment for drug addiction. He seemed happy, and like most recovering drug addicts and alcoholics, he was very nice. Alcoholics and drug addicts are horrible, horrible people when they're on drugs or on the sauce. But when they get off it, when they go through treatment, are the nicest people you'll ever meet.

The band

X was in a punk rock band at the time he was working at the treatment center.

I had brothers and a sister who were musicians in school, so when someone I knew was performing, I had the idea that I should go hear them no matter how little interest I had.

So I went to hear X's band.

I was completely out of place. It was in the basement of an old house. It was an unfinished basement. Meaning, in this case, that floors and most of the walls seemed to be made of dirt.

X was in his mid-20s. He had long hair which was thinning on top.

The rest of the band? I remember three of them.

They had two singers. One was tall and slender. Probably 15 or 16. I couldn't tell. The other was 14. He was little, cute, blond. Walked around smiling and he would say "Fuck you," to people he passed. He came in and some young women hugged him. He was adorable and the girls wanted to mother him. They thought he was a cute little boy---he thought he was Cary Grant. I thought it was strange that his parents let him do this. For one thing, the seam on the side of his pants were torn---it was fashionable among punk rockers at the time. You could see his underwear. His parents let him out of the house like that? I imagined his mother saying, "Honey, put on your good pants."

There was another guy who was a drummer? A bass player? He had the sides of his head shaved. He looked to me to be 15 or 16. I later saw him playing miniature golf with his mother and little sister. Made him seem like less of a rebel.

Anyway, they performed. The people started "dancing" which meant smashing into each other.

The young kid singer began drinking a large bottle of Coke. He drank with gusto, although he complained that it was flat. Seemed odd. Someone explained later that it was likely spiked with alcohol.

The kid sang a song. The lyrics seemed to be "I say ____ fuck!" over and over. I couldn't understand the word I left blank. Two syllables. And, apparently no one else could understand it, either. Because the kid would be singing this, screaming it into the microphone, and then he would scream "And you say---" then he'd stick the mic in the face of an audience member expecting him to yell the lyric, whatever it was. They would hesitate very slightly, mumble the first word and say the second word plainly.

How he ended up

I wondered whatever happened to X. I knew he had relapsed at one point and started taking drugs again. One of the other people I worked with had seen him dumpster diving. He called, "X! Hey X!"

X seemed enraged and yelled obscenities.

"Okay, X!" the guy smiled and waved.

I started doing some internet searches for him. He wasn't on Facebook. I found nothing.

I finally found out what happened to him. It dawned on me to do a search for his band. I found it on My Space. I listened to a few "tunes". They had a certain appeal. Having a singer whose voice hadn't changed gave it an interesting sound.

But the band had no future. You can't get a record deal when your singer is a teenage runaway. It said that the band broke up when the kid got in trouble and was sent home to his parents in another state.

The kid had a MySpace page, too. He's 38 now.

The other singer now works as a caterer. One of the others went on to play with another band and had gone on tour with them for a couple of years.

And X. I found out what happened to him. He died of a drug overdose in the 1990s.

He was like most drug addicts----an extremely nice person when he was off drugs, but horrible when he was using. He had been a very nice kid when I knew him in school.